Active: 2021 - Now
Ex0: Escape is a third-person looter-shooter bullet-hell. Escape the facility by blasting your way through the opposition, gain power and discover the secrets of the Ex0.
The main goal of this project is to create a game that is fun, visually engaging, and sonically interesting.
In order to create a fun game, I took a lot of inspiration from games that I enjoy. A few favourites include Destiny 2, Half-Life 2, and Titanfall. The concept of a classic looter-shooter game, like Borderlands as an example, has the mechanic of “killing a baddie will reward you with an item”. This mechanic feels good to a player, because it’s easy to see your power growing. As you overcome baddie after baddie, your inventory of great loot amasses.
Another aspect of games that feels rewarding is discovery. I wanted to give the players a goal but let them discover the solution. I think of games like Half-life where there comes a time to shoot and a time to solve puzzles. The puzzle elements in Ex0: Escape display as a room without an obvious exit, or a lever that doesn’t seem connected to anything, and the player will have to think about a solution to proceed.
Player movement was very important to setting the pace and creating the skill ceiling. The Ex0 can move very fast, double-jump and perform long slides. These movement abilities allow the player to jump and dodge the baddie’s laser bullets. Although using cover and peeking out can be effective, learning to dodge bullets will ultimately be a more successful strategy in dispatching an ever-increasing number of foes.
One of the reasons for learning Unreal Engine was to take advantage of the beautiful real-time rendering features. Although much of the beginning of the game takes place in a darker interior, the addition of ambient fog, detailed reflections, and ray-traced lighting give a remarkable look and feel to the game. Without the use of Unreal Engine, these sorts of techniques would be much more difficult to recreate in a reasonable timeframe. In the later parts of the game, moving outdoors allowed me to take advantage of the sky atmosphere features, which can easily simulate the lighting of a whole planet with clouds and god-rays.
Using 4k virtual textures and detailed models with multi-phased Level of Detail allow the game to be run on a variety of hardware. When the player comes close to a model, the detail is very realistic, and when moved further back, the transitions to lower-poly and resolution is almost unnoticeable.
As a developer with an audio production background, creating an interesting soundscape was a major goal. Creating the sound of this game started in FL Studio, where sounds were recorded, synthesized, and mixed into everything from UI sounds to gunfire. I was heavily inspired by games like Doom and Halo, and I knew that I wanted the sounds of the environment to pull the player into exploration, and focus the player when action was on-screen.
I was conscious of creating emotion through the storyline of the game. The ebb and flow of sound was consciously balanced to help immerse the player into the landscape. A lot of the musical inspiration came from trance music similar to Deadmau5- using moderately fast tempos and repetitive beats to both energize and fade into the background of the action. These moments are countered by more ambient sounds utilized when walking down a lonely hall, and more championing, heroic times when the music turns into awe-inspiring and over the top.
Programmatically, deciding when music or sound effect plays is a major component of the sound in the game. In some cases, Wwise is used and others, home made solutions for occluding or triggering audio are implemented. Effects like reverb and echo add the sense of space to make the world sound real.
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